General Perspectives on Networking

Communication has always been an important aspect of the human experience. We communicate in many ways beyond verbal sounds. As soon as a child is born he begins to learn how to read facial expressions, body language intonation or inflection and of course gradually learns the meaning of individual words and phrases.

The importance of communication only increases as we grow up and our world has given us the communication age. Today we can talk 'face-to-face' with a friend on the other side of the world, show him/her the pizza we're eating and order them a pizza so that they can enjoy it with us.

What makes this possible? In a word: Networking.

Also important today is networking and particularly IP networking in the commercial world. Companies rely so greatly on IP services today that an outage of 10 minutes could mean millions of dollars lost for some companies. This therefore means that there is a need for highly trained networking professionals. How do networks send data from one end to the next? What is a packet? Basic questions should lead us to asker bigger ones. This is the nature of our world we should get familiar with it.

The internet has become a large part of our everyday life and a means to generate income. If we can appreciate the importance and function of networks in our world we have opened up a brand new means for opportunity and income. We must stop riding the communications train and instead get in the cockpit and drive it ourselves.